Packet analyzer

My aim is to send a smiley at least once every 10 min of gameplay

Wireshark can be used to look at the packages sent between nodes in a game. There are two steps, capture and analyze.

Capture

Capturing can be done by running Wireshark on the node where we wish to capture all the data. By adding a filter we only see the packages that we care about. A simple filter is by adding the port we care about only.

port 28000

Analyze

There are two ways to make it more easy to understand what is going on with the packages in wireshark and that are dissectors and custom UI's.

DissectorsTo make sense of the packets we can add custom dissectors. Wireshark already dissect the IP and UDP/TCP part of the package so a custom only need to focus on the data payload. Dissectors can be written in C or lua. They need to be placed in the local plugin directory and that can be found by Help/About Wireshark and look at the folders tab.